TE23 Double Feature

Anke Laufer

“The Island”

vague. A brittle bundle is draped over the outstretched arms of the cross, the remains of a floral tribute. All at once it’s there, at your back, as if out of nowhere: the sound of an engine revving, a vehicle accelerating, you turn your head, the van in the corner of your eye, taking the bend dangerously, swerving. And a motionless face, encapsulated in the windscreen, last of all. From where you are lying, you watch silently as something dark snakes away from you across the tarmac. Getting up is an effort, but manageable. You see yourself staggering down the embankment behind the guard rail, through nettles and hogweed as tall as you are, disposable cups and plastic bottles, pizza boxes, dirty nappies and rubbish bags, with green-shimmering blowflies swarming around their bulging bellies. Then, just before giving up, you find it: the deer path that must once have been the track leading to the island. Beneath the blackish brown mass of rotting foliage are two parallel strips of gravel. The stems of the elder bushes 198

snap and exude their heavy, bittersweet scent as you forge a path through them, panting. 18:51 Deep in the island’s interior, darkness and silence keep watch between the tree trunks: slate grey, indigo. The pale shards of splintered snail shells are dotted over the black moss. Bright orange, tiger-striped and umber slugs; the fungus in ceremonial arrays: eggshell white, chestnut brown, butter yellow. Bursts of greenish gold light in the hip-high ferns, insects like flying sparks. And suddenly, barbed wire. A concrete driveway, then a platform with a long, low cabin on it. Its base is mottled, the render covered in cracks and lichen: tender grey and flesh-coloured rosettes, a kind of twee floral pattern on a rough ground. Decades of dead leaves are mouldering on its corrugated metal roof. To its left, a well with an iron plunger pump, the paint flaking off. When you try moving the handle up and down, the mechanism screeches and finally a trickle runs from the spout into your open 199